Click on any underlined word to see its meaning. Words with ** before and after, are downloadable links.
The Problem
All of us open a lot of windows simultaneously. That's called "multi-tasking", which is a great feature of Windows. But a window open means a file open, with a program open to read that file. A lot of open windows consumes a lot of memory resources. Few computers possess enough RAM to run all these applications at the same time.
The Solution
This is where the Virtual Memory comes into play. Virtual Memory moves those applications, which are least recently used, from your Ram to a special file on your hard disk. This creates more space in RAM, while allowing you to open even more Windows! When you want to continue using one of the applications, which was moved to the hard disk by the Virtual Memory, the virtual memory moves it back to RAM. When this is taking place you might notice a brief pause before that window is usable. The file on your hard disk where your Virtual Memory holds all this information is called a Swap File.
You can improve your computer's speed, if you have a second hard drive installed on your computer. (the installation of a hard drive is not within the scope of this series) With most of your programs stored on your primary drive, you can allocate the swap file to the second drive. Now you benefit from having one drive manage the swap file, while the other manages your program loading.
The Method
Follow the steps below to use the second